Fanon's Lexical Intervention: Writing Blackness in Black Skin, White Masks

Abstract

This essay provides a subtly new reading of Frantz Fanon's Peau noire, masques blancs ( Black Skin, White Masks; 1952) through a re-examination of one of its key terms: noirceur, or ‘blackness’. While noirceur slips easily into English translation as Blackness, it was never available or viable in French as a way to speak about Black identity, at least not before Fanon. Hence the need for Negritude. By considering Fanon's use of noirceur as a case of ‘semantic neologism’, I argue that Fanon's re-appropriation and resignification of the term played a role alongside the more spectacular ‘Negritude’ in the broader effort to represent — indeed, to lexicalize — Blackness in French.